Studio System: It's decline and the institutes today

Before:
- no studies or institues - just directors and film makers.
However as soon as cinema is realised to be a lucrative it became widely popular.

Southern California  (why? - cheaper, nicer weather, deserts, beaches, mountains and other usefuls scenes.)
- Start to "buy" sets, directors and stars, could even own their own cinema.
Actors could only appear in films distributed by the studio who owned them.

Big Five

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Three



 

Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood (a section):

DW Griffith was a great director and believed in himself and his own ideas. In 1908 he produced 60 films and in 1909 he made over 100. These films were often improvised or had very little script work done in advance. Griffith gained a reputation as a director who was good with actors. As all the films were silent he could coach and direct his actors through the film as he wanted to get the best possible outcome and view he had an example would be Mary Pickford in The New York Hat.

"Paul Merton's journey through early Hollywood reaches the 1920s when in prohibition America the cinema industry was on a collision course with its public because of a run of drink, drugs and sex scandals.

Having cynically used the popular press to promote its stars and keep their reputations spotless, it now faced a media obsessed with exposing the dark and decadent side of their glamour.
The programme tells the story of the rise and fall of the lost comic genius of silent Hollywood - Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle - who was charged with the murder of a young actress after an illegal drinks party went wrong. Paul Merton makes a powerful case that Arbuckle was an innocent man, an unfortunate victim of a new type of fame created by the Hollywood studios which had been turned against them. In their rush to clean up their act they were prepared to make the genial Arbuckle a sacrificial victim."

1924-1954
*Golden Age of Hollywood*

Why did it end?
1957 - cold war
         - civil right
         -invention of T.V (wasn't invented at this point, it became popular)
         - American New Wave
         - Versions of old studios and new ones (lots of small ones)
         - Independant film makers (like myself, I am an indepenant filmmaker compared to Universal.)